A place to live : The resolution of the African housing crisis in Johannesburg, 1944-1954

Abstract:

In March 1944, the African township of Orlando
near Johannesburg witnessed the first of a wave of squatter
movements which was to sweep across the Witwatersrand
during the next three or four years. The movements were,
for the most part, a desperate response to the apparent
inability or reluctance of the authorities to tackle the
massive backlog in housing provision which had developed,
in the major industrial centres as African workers and their
families flooded in to meet the expanding labour demand
brought about by the wartime economic boom. Although
South Africa had already experienced phases of rapid urbanization
during earlier periods (notably the First World
War), the magnitude of the problem which now confronted the
state's housing apparatus was unprecedented and soon took
on the dimensions of a full-blown crisis as decisive action
to remedy the situation failed to materialize. By the
beginning of 1955, however, not quite eleven years after
the squatters had first thrust themselves into the official
consciousness, an editorial in Bantu - the periodical published
by the Department of Native Affairs to disseminate
its 'viewpoint' amongst the African population - could
claim:
The solution of the Bantu housing problem has
now reached a stage which we can call the end of
the beginning. Improved houses are being completed
every day. During the next ten years hundreds of
thousands of Bantu will be properly housed for the
first time (2).
This paper is an attempt to move towards an explanation
of how this 'solution' of the 'Bantu housing problem' was
finally achieved and, more specifically, of how the foundations
of what we now know as Soweto came to be laid.
It focuses on the resolution of certain strategic issues linked to the provision of African housing and on the
establishment of the particular legislative and institutional
framework within which the concrete practices that were to
generate the form of the 'modern' township were brought
into play. In coming to terms with the mass of detailed
and often confusing empirical material on which the paper is
based, I have tried to avoid the danger of remaining trapped
at the level of merely descriptive narrative by explicitly
situating the evolution of African housing policy within the
political and economic context on which, I would argue, it
was always predicated.
In this respect, I have found what I consider to be a
useful point of entry into the labyrinth of 'facts' in
Manuel Castells' conceptualisation of 'urban planning'
as the theoretical field of state intervention in the 'urban',
where the latter "refers not only to a spatial form, but
expresses the social organization of the processes of reproduction".